Sihanoukville

Boom. There it is, right below the text, our little bit of paradise. I mean, it's ok, but you can see by the photo how crowded it is.. In the photo, beyond the wharf that is being built at the end of the beach, you can see Sihanoukville proper. We are about five km as the crow flies from town, the last of the beach developments, so quite quiet. This morning Kim and I walked the beach away from town, swam across the mouth of a small river and onto another stretch of beach area with no development. But for a handful of Cambodians passing, we had the beach to ourselves. Beautiful. We may have skinny dipped.

*****

The area we are in is called Otres 2; Otres 1 is at the far end of Long Beach, and the kilometre which separates the two is, for now, public park. There are some high end resorts here and more are coming, but there remain some small, mom and pop operations. We are staying in such a place. Honeymoon Bungalows is run by Michael, a transplanted prospector from the Yukon Territories, and his Khmer wife. The resort features 9 bungalows around a central courtyard, and dining area/bar with rooms above. Micheal built the place himself three years ago using North American building practices, except that all the structural materials are hardwoods - comparable to mahogany in span tables. After seeing so many buildings around here using practices that seem so questionable to me, this place really stands out. Above the bar is a large room for families, a 5 bed dorm room, and a double which we are in. The wall boards in these rooms rise to 8' and just end, so the space above is common to all three rooms. There's not a lot going on in any other rooms that your neighbors are not aware of. Privacy is not an option, but the bed is very comfortable and our hosts are great. The dorm room is filled with 20 something pot heads who party all night (on the beach), return in the wee hours and sleep the sunlight hours away. They are, however, quite and respectfull of the place and other guests. Cold water showers.

In our last post, you heard about our troubles booking a room here and our luck at finding a room. Since then we have seen a dozen desperate souls in the lobby, hoping to find a room.  There are none to be hand anywhere on the beach; everyone is solidly booked. It seems we got the last room available  until well into January, and Michael has told us we can have the room as long as we like. We are feeling very fortunate.

Micheal and I have have hit it off really well. He has a guitar which, for the price changing the strings for him, I am welcome to play whenever I wish. We also share a love of the Canadian wilderness, so we have already had some lengthy chit chats over beers.

We are booked into a resort on Phu Quoc on the 5th, so I guess this is home for the next few days. A little hard to take, but we will manage somehow. We'll post some more photos in a while.